We did it – again! Thanks to all the W13 campers for participating – I hope you all enjoyed it. A big thanks also to…

Sydney Shep for helping me with the organisation…

Flora Feltham, Sara Bryan and Thomas Koentges for the extra helping hands on the day…

THATCamp HQ for the support and resources…

and our generous sponsors InternetNZ, Victoria University of Wellington, and Wai-te-ata Press for enabling us to keep registration budget-friendly.

Here are a few THATCamp W13 photos to make you smile, and a few things you might be interested in checking out between now and the next one…

Australasian Association for Digital Humanities (aaDH)

aaDH conference, Perth, 18–21 March 2014

Digital Humanities courses at University of Canterbury from 2014

Stay tuned for the next one @thatcampwgtn

Firstly, thanks to those Campers who came to my roughly planned session and who gave such great input.

Although the purpose of the session was to talk about this issue across the GLAM sector as a whole, we used Archives New Zealand’s electronic finding aid Archway as a “test case”.

Following is a list of possible solutions the group came up with, ranging from very manual to more automated:

• Capture contact details of researchers and their interests – contact them when new material becomes available
• Set up webpage to publicise new material
• Create an RSS feed of newly added items
• Something similar to the trove news bot – easy to use, it checks for messages from Twitter to create queries in Trove’s newspaper database, tweeting the result – still requires a pull by researchers
• Provide ability for researchers to save search criteria
• Provide functionality to highlight/identify those search results that have been presented to the researcher previously; ability for researcher to filter out these out of the result set

We also discussed other technologies currently in use, or provided, by various institutions:

• British Library’s Mechanical Curator – undirected, haphazard, unplanned publishing of content
• Digital NZ’s custom search builder – a tool that allows anyone to create a mini search engine across Digital NZ’s aggregated digital content, also to create an embeddable widget to share the content
• Academia.edu – allows registered users to add research interests to their profile, and delivers content (research papers, etc.) that has been shared by other registered users and tagged with the chosen research interest phrase.
• Google Scholar and other library search tools – a post THATCamp investigation of Google Scholar revealed that the tool uses “robots” or “crawlers” to fetch files from websites for inclusion in the search results.  This is the type of thing I was wondering if researchers could create for themselves.

Discussion was had about the need for not only appropriate tags against each item of material so it can be categorised/classified, but also the need for metadata that will enable capture of when records are added / updated so the researcher can filter out those items they may have already seen.

The group also identified some possible funding/resourcing options:

• Create partnerships with open source development organisations
• Collaborate with National Library of New Zealand (this option relates specifically to the Archives NZ case)
• Apply to Internet NZ for funding
• Create a research question for an information studies masters student

sorry to have led thatcamp early. here’s the link to our play with video essays

thanks to everyone who took part

An agenda

• DH needs in particular
• existing open source DR: DSpace, Fez, Fedora Commons, Drupal
• Complexity vs usability
• Institutional concerns
• Software selection, procurement
  • Where to start looking for solutions, sifting information
  • Size of the community around an open source project – institutional risk.
  • crowdcrafting.org

Open source repository projects

• DSpace and Fedora Commons – duraspace.org/
  • DSpace is the “turn-key” web repository system – www.dspace.org/
  • Fedora Commons is a pure repository framework
• Fez – PHP web front-end developed by University of Queensland on Fedora Commons
• Islandora – islandora.ca/ – Fedora Commons modules for Drupal 6 and 7
• Project Hydra – Fedora Commons code for Ruby On Rails – projecthydra.org/

Open Online tools

• Open Refine – openrefine.org/
• Free Your Metadata – freeyourmetadata.org/
• Mash-ups of NZ open-access data: www.mixandmash.org.nz/
• Digital NZ – www.digitalnz.org.nz/

Software Carpentry – learning programming

• software-carpentry.org/
• programminghistorian.org/
• www.opentechschool.org/

Proprietary systems

Rosetta from Ex Libris, at National Library.

How can OSS projects help bridge gaps?

• Collate digital preservation policies, find the feature gaps, write some code!
• e.g. Open Providence Model, in Fedora Commons.

Follows is rough minutes from this session. Apologies if this is wrong or misleading – I did not recognise half of it

In 1950-59, 4037 publications in NZ (publication = pamphlet of 5+ pages, or a novel). Where are they, how do we get hold of them, and can they be freed?

• Publications NZ – has all of the things, in MARC. Federated to Worldcat. US Copyright law restricts stuff since 1870.
• Some stuff will need consultation with Iwi
• Reclaiming New Zealand’s Digitised Heritage project – Kiwi Alex
• Today’s bibliographies from libraries may not match online or physical storage. Stuff can be in stack, lost, moved, destroyed, storage, etc. It may be possible to use cross-catalogue data or cross-media data to track books down (e.g. mentions in Papers Past)
• Maybe leave out unpublished data
• How do we get institutions to lend the books to digitise? NL won’t lend out valuable material without conservator reporting.

What format, and how do we make it text-searchable?

• Agree on something like METS-ALTO and DC, and federate with OAI-PMH and/or use Digital NZ.
• NL scanned 300dpi colour TIFF images per page, into PDF with page image + OCR.
• e-books in EPUB, which is (more or less) zipped HTML. Kindle uses MobiPocket, another format based on Open eBook.
• OPDS is a syndication format – like RSS but for e-books.
• stats.govt.nz/ ← fully searchable open access (XML) yearbook data.
• TEI XML can be huge and possibly redundant for many use cases, but cab be used to embed contextual semantic data – www.tei-c.org/
• Gutenberg Project offer many formats – but some are auto-generated from a master

How do we make it available online?

• Some data will be very specific and of little commercial or even research value.
• Others will have high commercial value

Some have been digitised already.

• Digitisation efforts are already under way at National Library.
• Some stuff is in Google Books/Hathi Trust, but sourced from the US (little comms with Nat Lib NZ), can be tricky to get stuff from them
• Some is public domain, some copyrighted

Do we want to cover periodicals?

• Quite probably yes!
• RILM are going about digitising.

Who will host it, who will “own” it and maintain it over time?

• National Library seems the most sensible fit
• Public/Private collaboration; should we delete data that is objected to by one or two stakeholders, or preserve but restrict public access?
  • Reliance on corporate law and upholding contracts
  • Could the private organisations be not-for-profit, or similarly chartered?
  • Retain public ownership

Audience

Where is the data for matching your message, with the right audience, and the platform they tend to use? For example for 16 year-olds, we need Facebook, but not so much for retirees?!

• Media studies – in primary and secondary education, there are “bring your own device” initiatives which may have good data.
• Sometimes lack of demand is because people don’t know it’s available and/or don’t know they’re looking for it
• Local information could be sliced-and-diced by locality, person, and so on (semantic metadata) and be highly relevant to the punters.

Many institutions have a backlog of “items” in their holdings that are not currently discoverable/accessible in their online finding aid(s). Most institutions are actively working on rectifying this, as funding, staffing, etc., allow.

Currently if researchers want to know if more items relating to something they are interested in (e.g., person, place, time period) can now be found via an institution’s finding aid, the researcher has to decide how often to got back to the institution’s finding aid and re-submit their search criteria.

What if, instead, the researcher could submit the search string once and include in that search the request that he/she is automatically advised if anything new results from that search string are returned.  A bit like TradeMe searches. Or perhaps the Digital NZ search builder (digitalnz.org.nz/about/custom-search-builder).

What functionality would researches like? Are there existing add-ons that institutions could use? Or are there apps (I’m thinking ‘bots) that researchers could use to achieve this?

A session around the use of FLOSS software and open standards/protocols in digital repositories, and the needs of digital humanities in particular. Discussions could centre around Fedora Commons, DSpace, Fez, Drupal and so on. How do we weigh rigid metadata schemata (MODS, MARC, DC-TERMS etc.) versus relying on full-text indexes, or open access versus access control, flexibility and complexity versus ease of use?

Hi Im Greig I work in the digitisation team at NLNZ and am currently obsessed with the idea of making a cat card based battle game out of Papers Past Article Ideas.

The general Gist is to expose new audiences to our heritage data and encourage them to poke around with API’s and open Data sets.

Lite Background:

-World of Warcraft at its peak had 12 million active accounts around the world, players mined data out of the game data to display in databases (wowhead.com, thottbot.com). They also wrote modifications for the game to enrich this data with item drop rates, and “geographic” spawn locations for mobs(creatures). Many Calculators where created to work out the optimal DPS, HPS, migration etc.

-Collectible Card Games -CCG’s have been around for ages but got super popular in the 90s with games like Magic The Gathering. There are often sort after cards that cost sometimes hundreds of dollars to purchase.

-What if you generated cards from papers past article data? Finding a rare card would not cost thousands of dollars, just some time searching through Papers Past or even better writing a script/app/program to work out the best “characteristics”.

A crude mock up was made on monday at the NDF Hackathon and I really want to explore this idea further. You can try it out here:

dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/57626027/CatBattles/index.html

It was an amazing experience working with people with a variety of skills and ability’s, I want to keep that going!

Proposed Talk/Session:

-Go Through Background, explain as necessary

-mechanic demonstration (using Magic the Gathering Cards)

-Card Generation discussion. What Interesting information can be taken from a newspaper article and turned into a value or modifier. Is there anything useful that could be learned from this?

eg. I was tossing around the idea of bad OCR providing a special ability to encourage people to find these articles that would best benefit from text correction (which Im sure will get added to Papers Past eventually right?). As someone that works with the Digitised data this game could become a working tool.

Hi, I’m posting this on behalf of Jay, who suggested a discussion tomorrow on the topic of digital archiving.

Facilitator: Murray Hemi

I’d like to talk about audience. How do you use or match your publication/digital platform with the audience you are wanting to access. Is there any data or research undertaken with the NZ public to understand how different demographics are engaging with digital information sources – what platforms and how?

Note: afternoon session